Rubblebucket: Year of the Banana

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Rubblebucket’s seeds were sown when Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth, the group’s front persons, co-writers and co-producers, first began a friendship as jazz students at the University of Vermont. Soon after, they formed Rubblebucket, using the project to delve into pop, funk, dance and psychedelia; performances have spanned Bonnaroo to Glastonbury to their self-curated Dream Picnic Festival, and they’ve collaborated with kindred genre-blenders including Arcade Fire and Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Their latest full-length LP ‘Year of the Banana’ is perhaps their deepest and grooviest work yet. It speaks to the power of transforming and adapting relationships in a time when the world needs it most.

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Hannah Mohan’s new album is a first in more ways than one. Time Is a Walnut is the first solo release from the Western Massachusetts singer and songwriter, after nearly a decade fronting indie-pop band And the Kids. The album also comes amid the longest stretch Mohan has spent in one place since she left home at 16 to hop freight trains and hitchhike across North America.

Making music has been at the center of Mohan’s life ever since, even as other circumstances have changed—sometimes radically. A long-term relationship crumbled in 2019. Then the pandemic arrived, bringing an end to her band. After writing a batch of new songs taking stock of her situation, Mohan asked Alex Toth of Rubblebucket and Tōth to produce them, the latest installment of a longtime friendship and occasional creative collaboration. During the heart of the coronavirus lockdown, they spent a week recording in Mohan’s basement in Massachusetts, with subsequent overdubs at Toth’s place in Brooklyn. 

Mohan left home in Northampton when she was 16, and spent the next five years crisscrossing the continent, busking on the street for a living and learning songs around the campfires she shared with other traveler kids on the road. Though she doesn’t talk much about the experience, it was obviously formative.

She came back to Northampton in 2012 and started And the Kids with a friend from middle school. The group released three LPs between 2014 and 2019 and toured hard across North America before dissolving in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. As she emerges back into the world with Time Is a Walnut, Mohan is ready to embrace whatever comes next, even though it’s not always clear what shape it will take.

Links: Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Spotify

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